Top Reads of the Week:

At A Glance: The world’s only wildlife forensic lab is in southern Oregon. The lab usually specializes in endangered animal cases, but armed with a high-tech device, it’s now helping track shipments of contraband wood. There’s a small woodshop at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Forensics Lab. But there’s no sawdust, or power tools. The shop is more like an archive, containing samples of some of the rarest woods on the planet — African mahogany, Brazilian ebony and more.

At A Glance: Every year, more companies pledge to stop using ingredients whose production cause tropical deforestation. Although it is too early to fully measure the effectiveness of these commitments, the rising corporate wave raises a number of questions: What are large companies’ attitudes toward conservation? How genuine are their commitments: are they driven purely by market pressures, or do these pledges signal a fundamental shift in corporate attitudes regarding social responsibility toward tropical forests?

At A Glance: Twenty years after ratifying a legally binding UN convention which obligates parties to deal with invasive alien species, considered to be main direct drivers of biodiversity loss across the globe, Indonesia has drawn up a national strategic plan on the matter.

At A Glance: Though scientists are striving hard to discover how the world’s forests will respond to climate change – whether they will tip from being carbon sinks to being carbon sources – much remains clouded in mystery.

At A Glance: A zero-deforestation commitment from the world’s third largest viscose producer is being hailed by some conservationists as further evidence that the entire global fashion industry is undergoing a rapid transformation to remove deforestation from its products, a remarkable turnaround that has taken place over the past two years.

At A Glance: China will increase its forest stock by 4.5 billion cubic meters by 2030 if the country meets its proposed climate plan, released this week to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The plan, known in climate negotiator speak as an Intended Nationally Determined Contribution or “INDC”, lays out the country’s intention to peak its greenhouse gas emissions no later than 2030 while making “best efforts to peak early.”

At A Glance: UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee, meeting in Germany overnight Australian time, unanimously called on Australia to ensure logging and mining remained banned across the “entire” 1.58 million ha Wilderness WHA.

At A Glance: The Amazon rainforest might seem like a massive expanse of monotonous green. However, a recent study has found that within this monotony lies a kaleidoscope of chemicals unique to all the different plant species of the forest.

At A Glance: A supplier of palm oil giants Wilmar and Musim Mas has continued to bulldoze valuable forest in Indonesia’s Leuser Ecosystem despite its most prominent customers’ zero-deforestation commitments and repeated exposés of its activities, according to a new report from environmental group Greenomics-Indonesia.